The Future of Education

Increasing enrollments in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) are having a dramatic, adverse effect on degrees awarded in the Humanities (history, philosophy, linguistics, classics, literature and languages). In the United States, this decline shrinks budget allocations that maintain Humanities offerings and threatens the sustainability of curricula once deemed essential to the core values of undergraduate education. This paper documents a response to that trend. At the University of Washington, a flagship state university in Seattle, the Divisional Dean of Humanities and a lecturer in English literature have created and implemented an online course that aspires to attract students from across the STEM disciplines and provide them with a robust introduction to the Humanities. The course, “Introduction to the Humanities” has been taught twice and has attracted a vast number of students who are often drawn to the flexible, asynchronous schedule and, for non-native speakers of English, to the possibility of not having to be physically visible as they practice their language skills. The students who enroll in the class have displayed a broader range of ethnic, racial and religious diversity than in other humanities courses at the University. The paper displays the structure of the course and how it works to meet students where they are. It offers a “tool kit” for replicability and tours readers through the triad structure: 1) humanities artifacts (for example: an ancient coin, a Sanskrit text, the Asian American anthology of literature) chosen and studied by faculty members; 2) faculty members who tell their own stories of coming to the humanities and who offer lectures on their artifacts and 3) subject areas that these inquiries represent. The innovation in the course, and the most popular aspect for the students, may be the videos in which faculty describe what brought them into their fields of study, how they’ve sustained their work and how it is of value in a STEM-saturated world.

Keywords: Online Learning; Innovative Teaching, Humanities; Strategies for e-learning;